Star Wars violence okay for kids

I've been asked whether it's okay to let little kids watch movies such as Star Wars, because they're quite scary and violent.

Bambam played Lego Star Wars on the Xbox before we watched the Star Wars movies with him. We felt it would give him some more background to the levels he was playing. The good part about that is that he felt fairly 'empowered' watching the scary bits, because he had already 'done' those levels in the game. The violence also seems less when you associate it with cartoon Lego violence. We've done the same with Lego Harry Potter and are now watching the Harry Potter movies. They're quite scary too, actually!

He was surprisingly good at understanding the emotional journey of Anikin into Darth Vader. We, as parents, welcomed the depth of this development compared to kids' shows actually aimed at this age bracket where 'baddies' are just bad for no reason. At least Darth Vader/Anikin is a complex person. (As a movie critic, I'd describe all this differently, but I'm talking child-rearing here). I think it actually helps him deal with the real world, in which nobody thinks or believes that they are the 'baddy'. People do things for complex reasons, including bad things, and Star Wars helped make Bambam aware of that. He often tries to discover what might drive other children to do 'naughty' things, and has also become more critical of his own motives at times.

Watching Star Wars with children has a bunch of other advantages as well. There is a lot of merchandise you can buy which can help in getting kids interested in games or activities they might not otherwise do. For example: we have Star Wars Guess Who and Star Wars Battleships game. I'm pretty sure Bambam wouldn't touch such sedate strategy board games if they weren't so excitingly branded.

Star Wars also has some pretty strong female characters. Padme Amidala can fall a bit flat at times. They tried to write her as a strong independent woman, but she seems overly reliant on the men around her, both politically and emotionally. Now Leia, with her great blaster aim, her snappy comebacks at the amourous Han Solo and the threatening Darth Vader: that's a real strong woman. She's in charge! I've seen Pebbles' princess role play turn a lot more active and empowered since watching Star Wars. Instead of dressing up and waiting in the tower to be rescued, her 'princesses' now run around shooting blasters and ordering robots about. And then there's Ahsoka, who's a female Jedi/Padawan.

Another aspect of Star Wars that is fairly interesting from a parenting point of view are the robot characters. Kirk Jr may have inherited Asperger traits from Kirk, my hubby. He tends to identify with objects more than people. For example, watching Harry Potter, he imagined being the Golden Snitch and allowing Harry to catch him so Griffindor could win. By contrast, Bambam wished to be one of the Quidditch team members who carry a cudgel to hit the ball (and perhaps other players) with. In Star Wars, Kirk Jr identifies with R2D2, which still allows for quite broad imaginative play and interaction with other children. All of which is good.

So, yes, I think watching Star Wars, and playing Star Wars games is a good thing to do with kids. Like anything, you should do it with them and then, if there is any issue with scariness or anything else, you'll be there to spot it, guide and explain.

Avatar vs. Dragon

I was reading SFX magazine today and apparently, James Cameron is going to future-proof the next two instalments of Avatar so they will still be ahead of all the rest technically.

Now it may be because I only watched Avatar last week, in 2D at home on the telly, but what impressed me wasn't the technical part. Yes, the visuals were pretty and the world was big and shiny, but I wasn't bowled over. Like most reviewers, I was incredibly underwhelmed by the 'dances with smurfs' plot line. A nice enough flick, but hardly the future of film.

What I liked were the details of the environment. This movie, combined with my imagination full of a Peter Hamilton reading marathon I recently completed, makes for a fascinating world which I wish they'd explore in future films. The corporation exploiting Pandora for financial gain - including the military trappings, cool armoured suits and insidious plots to either ingratiate the natives or cow them into submission - reminded me of Fallen Dragon, a great early Hamilton. While in Avatar, the corporation is simply shoved into the 'baddy' slot of a simplistic nature=good, capitalism=bad setup, in Hamilton's book, they have another side to them. Hamilton's corporation uses a capitalist method to achieve the humanist goal of improving the human condition. Whether those goals justify the means is left open to interpretation.

How about showing us the more human side of the corporation in Avatar as well? Why are they mining unobtainium? Perhaps it is needed to provide resources to an overcrowded and miserable planet Earth. Perhaps they use it to build ftl engines to start an era of expansion and progress. Clearly, the world they are from is far from perfect. For example, the treatment Jake needs to repair his legs exists, but is not available to all. But perhaps the economic benefit of unobtainium would actually improve the living conditions for all humans. We don't know this, but there's two whole films in which we might find out.

In Fallen Dragon a completely alien being with huge reserves of intergalactic knowledge encounters people and adapts its own and human technology to fight off the threat posed by the returning invading corporation. In Avatar the scene is set for a similar development. A human element has been introduced to the mother tree on Pandora, and if that planet has any sense, it will prepare itself for the return of the corporation with even more impressive military force than those uber-cool armour suits.

I'm interested in seeing what Pandora is capable of. Is the planet as a whole sentient, or is it a network more like 'the internet' with no particular goals or will of it's own? Is all communication 'wired' through the connecting plugs found on most creatures and plants or is there some kind of wireless connection as well? How aware is Pandora of what goes on on the surface? Given the response of nature during the final battle, it would seem there is a form of sentience or direction to Pandora, but it was not something even the Na'vi had seen before. Perhaps human elements like free will, adaptability, a scientific mind, bravery, or a sense of discovery entered the fairly stable but stagnant planet 'mind' as a result of the downloading of Grace and Jake? How much more might it change? How powerful is it? What are it's weaknesses?

What's very important is that this all-natural environment is not portrayed simplistically as entirely good and filled with noble but misunderstood savages. Even the scary predators were only hated by the human invaders because they had no 'understanding' of the way of life on Pandora. What rubbish. Tribal societies are no nobler than any other. Nature isn't moral at all. Plenty of things are not good about life on Pandora. For example there seems to be a rigid inescapable social structure. Let's see some of the limitations and downsides as well. If this film is meant to be future-proof, it better become a lot more morally ambiguous and interesting, besides being visually stunning.